The Living Dummy of Daul House
by Nostalgia Tales
Summary: Emmy Daul is staying at her cousin's house for the summer, and it's all kinds of haunted. Emmy's biggest concern, though, is the monster she brought with her - an old ventriloquist's doll she can barely call her friend. (Content warnings: General scares, some language, mind games)
1. Chapter 1

"...And this is the dining room. It's the most haunted part of the house."

"It's not haunted." My uncle looked up and frowned at me as I adjusted the dummy in my lap. "Why are you talking to it?" I started to open my mouth when my cousin spoke.

"He's our _guest,_ Papa," Carlotta said, turning to face me from the thin book she was reading. Her smile was thin and red and perfect the way I could never get it. "It's only right to give him a tour of the house. Don't you remember when we did the same for Emmy?" I smiled a little. Carlotta was older than me by a lot - I was never sure if it was five or six years - but she still went along with things. "So Emmy," she said, "have you told him what kind of ghost we have?"

"There's no _ghost,"_ Uncle Drew said again, but Carlotta looked at him and frowned her sharp frown before smiling at me again. He shrugged and looked at his phone again, and I turned to the doll in my lap.

"I want to hear!" It was kind of dumb to give him his own voice, but it was fun, too, and Carlotta laughed a bit at it. I couldn't get my voice quite deep yet, but I was practicing. I switched back to my regular voice. "Should I tell him or should you?"

"You tell him the outline," Carlotta said, "I'll give examples." I nodded and looked back to my doll, and his head nodded along. We were all sitting around the table waiting for Aunt Jane to come home, since Carlotta had a violin rehearsal and her mom had the good car.

"So the ghost haunting this house wasn't here before," I started, "or if it was, it was quiet before. But after they - Carlotta and her parents I mean - moved in, things started happening all the time."

"Not right when we moved in," Carlotta added, "It was right after I came home from college."

"Stuff started falling off shelves," I said, pushing the doll's eyebrows up so he'd look interested, "And then shelves would fall apart. Nobody was sure what would happen next, because it usually came out of nowhere."

"Because the house is old and needs renovating," Uncle Drew said, "It's probably water damage. There was a storm here a few years, you know, a terrible one. The whole house must have flooded."

"That doesn't explain the vases falling off the shelf, Papa." Carlotta looked back to the shelf we meant - right over the sink, holding some new white and blue vases - and looked back to him. She was still holding her book up, and looked almost like an old painting with her black hair rolled to her neck and her pearl necklace. "They just toppled over."

"Poor polish work." I knew Uncle Drew believed in ghosts - he always had, my dad had said when he told me stories about the family. Uncle Drew was afraid of ghosts and shadows and bad report cards and germs, and he pretended not to be so it'd scare them off. It wasn't working.

"The ghost comes and goes," I said, "but it really doesn't like some things."

"Mostly when they bring their friends' sons over," Carlotta said, "Or talk about me getting married. I think the ghost is jealous." Uncle Drew's phone buzzed, and he looked at it.

"It doesn't matter _what_ the ghost thinks," Uncle Drew said, standing up, "because there isn't one. And if there is, it can live with us planning for the future if it could for everyone mother's here. Are you ready to go?"

"I am." Carlotta looked at me. "Emmy, are you alright keeping by yourself if Mom has to work for a couple hours?" I nodded.

"I've got Slappy with me," I said, and she smiled.

"Well, Slappy, I expect you to take good care of her, alright? If you don't, I'll ask the ghost to haunt _you._ " She stood up and put her book down.

The crash happened so fast - I saw white falling and then the sound shattered across the floor - that I didn't have time to do anything but scream. Carlotta jumped back, eyes wide, and Uncle Drew ran around the table to see as she wrung her hands.

One of the vases had fallen and broken into a million pieces on the floor. I stared, looked up at the shelf, and then looked at Slappy.

"Ghost?" I mouthed, and he nodded his head before we both turned back to face the mess all over the floor.

* * *

 _Made a tiny revision to the opening to make things a bit clearer. Hope it helps!_


	2. Chapter 2

"So what do you make of it?"

 _"Yeesh."_ Slappy had already claimed the desk chair and one of the pillows for himself, so I was sitting on the bed while he propped his arm on the desk. "That spirit was so shy I didn't even see it. Talk about ghosting."

"That's not what that-" I sighed and shook my head; he was almost like my Dad sometimes, using slang all wrong in a way I wasn't sure was on accident. "But yeah, it's weird, isn't it? They've got the sounds, stuff breaking, furniture falling apart... But it hasn't tried to hurt anybody, at least from what I've heard."

"Sounds like it just wants them out." Slappy looked at his wooden hand, fixing his cuff before looking back to me again. "So why bring us here, kid, if you knew about the ghost?" I hated being called kid - I'm 16 - but it was better than most of Slappy's nicknames. At least he gave up on calling me "slave" a few months before.

* * *

I'd found him last summer - old, dusty suitcase and weird words, which I now kept in the notes on my phone for emergencies, whatever an emergency would be in this situation. Mom and dad had left me in the house for a week right after that, because they didn't have to worry about me getting in trouble.

Except I _did_ get in trouble, didn't I? It was a whole week of nightmares, thrown shoes, mean names, and one expertly-timed paint balloon. I was pretty proud of that one.

And then, at the end of the week - when there was maybe twelve hours before my parents got home - the dummy dragged himself up to me on a broken leg, stared at me with icy blue eyes, and held out a hand.

"Draw?" He'd said? And for some reason, I took it.

"Draw."

* * *

"Hey, Conductor Cuckoo, you zoned out again." I blinked - two wooden fingers were snapping at my face, and Slappy glared at me with those icy blue eyes of his. We weren't... friends, really, but I didn't mind having him in the house or having to drag him around anymore. Sometimes we even got along.

It didn't make him any less mean, though.

"I said why'd you bring us to a stupid haunted house?"

"Because I'm not allowed to go to Nevada with Mom and Dad," I said, "and the ghost's never hurt me."

"I thought you said you were scared of it when we were packing up. Or do you have the memory of a hamster?"

"I said it _scared_ me because it made loud noises in the middle of the night." I hugged my knees to my chest, and Slappy rolled his eyes.

"Have you _heard_ yourself snore? It's like a foghorn blowing into a megaphone." There was a box of tissues next to my bed - I grabbed one and threw a wad of it at Slappy's head. it glanced off with a faint _whiff_ before hitting the ground. "Ow," he said, voice flat.

"Look, I can't make the ghost go away-"

"Obviously."

"-but I like visiting Carlotta and her family. She's cool. And we're going to see a bunch of neat stuff tomorrow, so it'd be great if you didn't drive her any crazier than the ghost does."

"Me?" Slappy put a hand to his chest. "You think I'd torment your lovely, courteous cousin and her family? How could you have such little faith, Emmy?"

"Slappy, you once swapped out the butterfly release cage at camp with one full of grasshoppers."

"And the screams were _hilarious."_ He tilted his head back and laughed - not his big evil laugh, because the walls were too thin for that. We'd learned that last night thanks to Carlotta playing violin until about 10:30 or so. Her room was between her parents' and mine, but it never hurt to be careful. "Besides, I gave them back."

"After I looked a half-hour for the cage and found it with the Tupperware. You're lucky you didn't kill any of them." He shrugged, and I sighed. "Look, just _promise_ you'll try to behave at least _some_ of the time we're here, alright? No tormenting my family."

"I promise," he said, that smile I knew not to trust on his face, "I won't torment your family. I'll save that for the ghost."


	3. Chapter 3

"Hey." It was the first thing Slappy had said in an hour; a new record for him, honestly. I looked up from the book I was reading to see him resting his big wooden head on his hand, arm still propped on the table. He looked serious and ridiculous. His head didn't move, but his eyes rolled to the side to look at me.

"What's up?" I dog-eared the page and closed the book. "You've been quiet."

"I was thinking. I know it's a foreign concept to you." I ignored the remark and made a small _go on_ gesture with my hand, and he turned his whole body to face me. "When did you say this started?"

I paused. "Well... I think Carlotta was like 18 or 19 when they moved here, because she'd been in college for a while. I think she told me she didn't even see the house until her first semester was done. And she's... 21 now, I'm pretty sure? So it was about two years ago. More like one and a half, actually." I remembered a lot of frustrated calls between my dad and Uncle Drew over the whole thing, when they were usually best friends. They were twins, actually - fraternal, though, instead of identical. It probably saved me a lot of trouble with pranks growing up.

"And you said it was noises, things being misplaced, and broken pottery?" He hummed thoughtfully. "That vase was pretty." He paused.

"Pretty ugly," I said.

"Pretty ug-" he stopped and looked at me, and I could have sworn he managed to frown with that wooden mouth. " _Hey,_ don't spoil my act, kid."

"Sorry." Normally I'd have fired back something sharper, but I was interested in where he was going with this. "Why do you ask?"

"In my experience," he said, and he rested his chin on his hands with a faint _clack,_ "waking up a spirit requires some sort of catalyst. There has to be some sort of trigger and a reason behind it. Am I going too fast for you?"

"I'm on debate team, Slappy, I'd prefer if you picked it up a little."

"What I want is context. The year, the circumstances, what the ghost did when it first woke up." He was being... weirdly focused about this.

"And what does that do?" I asked, waiting for whatever tension was creeping up my neck to break. Letting Slappy stew in his own thoughts was usually a bad idea, but he seemed dead set on dealing with this ghost. Or just getting in a fight with it, that seemed more his style.

"What it does is give us some idea on what we're dealing with, and how we can fight back." He finally jumped off the chair, hands folding behind his back. "I didn't see anything before the the vase fell."

"Neither did I," I said, and he nodded.

"So I think this is just a specter. Pretty weak, probably can't possess anything. Not as likely to possess humans, which is good for you, even though I think it'd be an improvement."

"Rude." I turned to face him now, brow furrowing. "There's different tiers of ghost? So, what, is poltergeist one of the strongest?"

"Third most dangerous," he said matter-of-factly, "and a pain in the rear to deal with. Worse at holding a conversation than you." Okay, I had to stifle a snort at that one. He wasn't _funny,_ but it was kind of impressive how he could just come up with mean quips on the fly like that.

"Hard to imagine you having a pleasant chat with anybody, dude. So if this thing can't possess me, what's the downside?"

"They usually can't talk, so they can't be reasoned with. Usually it just takes changing something small to get rid of them, like planting a certain flower they remember or putting something in the right place."

"So what are you suggesting, we figure out what's bothering it and try to fix it?"

"Pretty much." He giggled a bit, a sinister sound that completely creeped me out. "After we have a little fun, of course. Let's see if it can take what it dishes out."

I was about to respond when we both heard footsteps, and Slappy climbed back onto the chair. He was limp and still by the time I heard a polite knock.

"Emmy, practice ended early. Can I come in?" I glanced at Slappy, who nodded.

"Yeah, you're good," I said, and Carlotta opened the door. She almost filled the whole doorway - she was 6'3" and I'd never seen her be embarrassed about it. "What's up?"

"You want to get out of the house?" she said, leaving the door open and leaning on the frame. "I have homework the rest of the afternoon, and you got here so late last night we didn't really get a chance to hang out." I brightened a bit.

"Sure!" I stood up, dusting off my jeans. I wasn't nearly as tall as her, but 5'9" isn't too shabby. "Can I bring Slappy with me?"

"I'm cool with that." Carlotta looked at the desk chair and smiled. "You comfy there, Slappy?" I walked over and lifted him up, hoisting him onto one arm so he was "sitting" on it. "Hope you don't mind third-wheeling with us today." Before I could respond, Slappy opened his mouth.

"Sounds good to me," he said, and Carlotta gaped, "I always liked taking trouble on the road!"


End file.
